English 267: Victorian Literature

Professor Childers

14 June 1999

"Knowledge spins where once larva was formed."

--Michel Foucault

"Discourse, alas, is the only defense with which we can counteract discourse, and there is no available discourse on AIDS that is not itself diseased."

--Lee Edelman

Along with colonization, the West, and Great Britain in particular, engaged in the project of normalizing the heterosexual. In particular, the family unit, headed by one woman, one man, and their children became the focus of Victorian sexual values and the various deployments of sexuality. The heterosexual, and the white woman in particular, became the focus of many anxieties regarding sexuality. The category of the normal heterosexual defined itself in a negative way—in terms of that which it was not. It was not abnormal. It was not homosexual. And it certainly was in no way perverted. Yet, in order to cohere, the heterosexual needed to inscribe perversion somewhere, and did so upon both the body of the homosexual and upon the body of the racialized Other. Mythologies about the potent, often dangerous, sexualities of foreigners came into being, particularly constructed as threats to the normal sexuality of whites, usually in the form of rape, of perversion, and of sexual acts deemed unspeakable, but also in discourses on the threat of venereal disease. Traces of these discursive strategies remain in the various discourses on AIDS, for example, particularly the discourses of its origins in Africa. In this paper, I intend to examine how the metaphors of disease, sexuality, and the body of the racialized Other figure in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

As Ellis Hanson points out, the comparison between AIDS and vampirism, and the various metaphors attached to each, is easy to make. Hanson notes "that while vampire films and novels may have lost their original capacity to excite homosexual panic, this collapse arrived just in time for a replacement genre: the AIDS documentary" (325). Vampirism and AIDS are both transmitted via blood, each has a metaphoric charge that's linked with sexuality, in particular with illicit sexuality, each is coded as coming from foreign origins, and each results in a state that, to society, is neither quite dead nor quite alive, but "undead." Hanson notes that

Of course, this begs the question, what is at stake in coding the alien as diseased and the English woman, in particular, as being both immune and, simultaneously, in danger of contamination? The contradiction in the claim that Englishness is both immune and in danger of contamination might threaten to undermine both claims. However, as David Halperin argues, contradictions in the dominant discourse "not only do…not cancel one another in practice, they actually reinforce one another and work together systematically to produce, over and over again, the same effect" (46). In fact, one finds a similar contradiction in the discourses on Western heterosexuality and AIDS as one finds with Englishness and vampirism. Foucault wrote "societies live because there are sick, declining societies and healthy, expanding ones; the race is a living being that one can see degenerating; and civilizations, whose deaths have so often been remarked on, are also, therefore, living beings" (Birth of the Clinic 35-36). England sees itself as expanding and healthy, and Dracula's society is clearly sick and in decline. But the very fact that a society can decline provides material for anxiety. In the case of the threat to Englishness, the contradiction serves to discipline the English person, particularly the English woman, to behave virtuously, holding out both the ideal and the threat of contagion should she fail to. Van Helsing often invokes the virtues of first Lucy and then later Mina as being able to save these women from their vampiric condition. Illness, as it often does, takes on a moral character.

Not only is there a moral character to disease, but, as can be seen in the discourses of alien contagion, there's a political and imperial character. Susan Sontag notes that "the military metaphor in medicine first came into wide use in the 1880s, with the identification of bacteria as agents of disease. Bacteria were said to 'invade' or 'infiltrate," much in the same way Dracula attempts to invade and infiltrate England and Englishness (65-66). Not only are there military metaphors, but many of these same metaphors, particularly of invasion and infiltration, apply as colonial metaphors as well. Foucault writes "the first task of the doctor is therefore political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government" (Birth of the Clinic 33). Combining its moral imperative, not only was medicine linked "with the destinies of states," but it "must no longer be confined to a body of techniques for curing ills and for the knowledge that they require; it will also embrace a knowledge of a healthy man, that is, a study of non-sick man and a definition of the model man" (Birth of the Clinic 34). Professor Van Helsing refers to Mina Harker as being a "so clever woman" for taking notes in shorthand (Stoker 189), and then later, he says "Oh, Madam Mina, good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read; and we men who wish to know have in us something of angels' eyes. Your husband is a noble nature, and you are noble too, for you trust, and trust cannot be where there is mean nature" (Stoker 190). In general, Van Helsing's praise for Mina Harker continues throughout the novel, even after her infection with vampirism, figuring her as the model woman; clever, noble, good, and compared to angels.

The alien is not the only figure projected as being diseased. Abnormal sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, has been equated with contagion for a long time. Guy Hocquenghem wrote "venereal diseases seem to play the leading role in the paranoiac ideology concerning homosexuality" (70), and continues, stating that

While it might be objected that Dracula is not homosexual, but rather heterosexual, as he has three female consorts and vamps the English women, it must be first be noted that the Count claims Jonathan Harker as belonging to him when the three female consorts attempt to vamp Harker. "How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast your eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me" (47)! the vampire says. While Dracula's desire may be predominantly to vamp women, under Victorian sexological standards, this does not save him from the possibility of perversion. The heterosexual, as a species, wouldn't debut in English until 1892, five years before the publication of Dracula (Katz 19). Jonathan Ned Katz notes that "heterosexual was not equated here with normal sex, but with perversion--a definitional tradition that lasted in middle-class culture into the 1920s" (19-20). Like vampires, "heterosexuals were also guilty of reproductive deviance. That is, they betrayed inclinations to 'abnormal methods of gratification'--modes ensuring pleasure without reproducing the species. They also demonstrated 'traces of the normal sexual appetite'--a touch of the desire to reproduce" (20). Heterosexuality enters into the medical discourse, five years before the publication of Bram Stoker's novel, as being abnormal and perverse. The homosexual, which had become a species in itself almost thirty years earlier, is now joined by a parallel species, the heterosexual, both of whom are pitted against "the normal." Almost three decades earlier, Foucault notes that "the nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology" (History of Sexuality I 43). At the end of the nineteenth century, the heterosexual enters the medical and sexological discourse as a case history of its own. Katz argues that it took the intervention of Freud to begin to normalize the heterosexual.

Stoker was aware of the developments in the sexological discourse, and presumably would have been aware of this new development only five years prior to the publication of his novel. Jeffrey L. Spear claims:

Athena Vrettos concludes that Dracula is a text that exposes the contradictions in Victorian discourses on imperialism, health, and disease. Writing of both Stoker's Dracula and Haggard's Ayesha, she notes "having attained perfect physical health, they are seemingly invulnerable; yet their bodies are also profoundly abnormal. They are racial and biological anomalies, and as such they invoke the spectacle of difference--the threat of otherness. This threat is only partially resolved by the endings of Dracula and She" (173). Vrettos comes to the conclusion that Stoker "poses these questions but fails to answer them, exposing the ideological fissures that marked questions of health and disease" (174). I disagree with Vrettos' contention that Stoker's text functions to "recuperate imperialist ideology while subverting it" (174). As I argued earlier in this paper, ideological fissures are not necessarily indicative of subversion. In the case of Dracula, I argue that the ideological fissures around the discourses of health and disease serve to discipline the reader of the text by holding out an ideal on the one hand, a Foucauldian virile body rendered docile to the discourse, and on the other hand, these discourses hold out the threat of disease and death, of otherness as Vrettos herself points out. Vrettos notes "this contradiction is convenient for Stoker because it allows him to stress the correlation between Dracula's racial superiority and his imperial project, while providing an explanation for his final defeat" (172). That this threat is not completely resolved is no surprise, because in resolving it, the threat loses its power to discipline the good, and healthy, English subject. Commenting on subject formation, Judith Butler writes "subjection is, literally, the making of a subject, the principle of regulation according to which the subject is formulated or produced. Such subjection is a kind of power that not only unilaterally acts on a given individual as a form of domination, but also activates or forms the subject" (84). This double function of subjection is what is produced by the contradiction of this discourse in Dracula.

In Dracula, vampirism figures, as it often does in vampire stories, as a highly eroticized condition. Jonathan Harker, Lucy Westenra, Mina Murray (later Harker), Renfield, and even Professor Van Helsing are all seduced by it, although not all succumb to it. The Count and the three female vampires are very seductive, and it is their seductiveness that is dangerous, even deadly, especially to English women. Both women become infected with vampirism through the course of the novel, and ironically, it requires the knowledge of a foreign professor of medicine, Van Helsing, to save them, failing in the first case, but succeeding in the second.

Vrettos comments that Dracula's "victims' bodies exhibit the symptoms of consumption because they are, quite literally, being consumed" (165). This pun on the word consumption is significant; while most critics, including Vrettos, have focused on consumption in terms of the consuming of food and drink, I intend to explore the other definition of consumption, one that would have been prevalent in the minds of a Victorian reader: tuberculosis. Susan Sontag argues that TB, or consumption, was figured as a disease that "expresses character" (43), particularly that of an overly emotional person. One of the symptoms of both TB and vampirism is a certain anemic languidness and lack of energy, with Lucy's condition after being vamped a prime example. Also, one can fairly easily fit Lucy's behavior with her three suitors into the metaphor of consumption as a disease that reflects her inner emotional character. On the other hand, Sontag notes that "the virtuous only become more so as they slide toward death" (41) in nineteenth century literature, and we find Van Helsing commenting about the virtues of both Lucy and Mina as they slide closer and closer to death. Importantly, the Victorians believed that getting a change of scenery was an effective treatment for consumption, particularly trips to Italy and other parts of Southern Europe. Just as often, TB patients were confined in sanatoriums, but these sanatoriums were often located outside urban areas. In either event, Sontag comments that "it is not an accident that the most common metaphor for an extreme psychological experience viewed positively--whether produced by drugs or by becoming psychotic--is a trip" (36). In Dracula, we have a reversal of this paradigm--the original consumptive, Dracula, makes his trip to England, vamping Mina, and forcing her and her friends to take a trip into Eastern Europe.

Dr. Seward and Professor Van Helsing represent medical authority in this particular text; while the former largely confines his practice to psychiatry, the latter not only practices medicine relatively generally, but also dabbles a bit in religion along the way. His methodology relies as much on superstition as it does science. In one character, we have the representation of medical and moral authority, putting Van Helsing in the interesting position of being both priest and doctor, who are, Foucault argues, "the natural heirs of the Church's two most visible missions--the consolation of souls and the alleviation of pain" (Birth of the Clinic 32). Foucault points out that in the French Revolution, these two figures--the physician and the priest--have different, albeit related, duties, but with Van Helsing they are once again collapsed into the same figure.

In Dracula, the title character, after a brief introduction at the beginning, largely disappears from the rest of the text. He's got a few appearances later in the novel, once in the mansion he has rented, once in the heart of London, once with Mina, and then finally back in Transylvania as he is returning home. Most of the information that the characters have about Dracula comes from the signs of his presence, such as Renfield's utterances of the presence of his Master, the two holes on Lucy Westenra's neck, and the presence of unusual behavior in wolves. Michel Foucault wrote that "the symptom--hence its uniquely privileged position--is the forming which the disease is presented: of all that is visible, it is closest to the essential; it is the first transcription of the inaccessible nature of the disease" (Birth of the Clinic 90). Further, Foucault writes that "the symptoms allow the invariable form of the disease--set back somewhat, visible and invisible--to show through", and in the case of Dracula, it requires Professor Van Helsing to be able to read these visible and invisible symptoms of the presence of the vampire (Birth of the Clinic 90). Vampirism and its signs also stand in as signifiers for Dracula's presence-in-absentia in the novel, and like a language, the signs of vampirism are contagious, reproducing themselves and their own signs. In fact, the anxiety over contagion in Dracula produces an excess of discourse that is the production of the novel itself. Throughout the novel, Dracula himself remains largely invisible, much like a disease in the body, visible only through the symptom-signs present in Renfield, Lucy, and Mina.

Foucault argues that in order to understand the language these symptoms present to us, medicine established the medical gaze, which surveys the entire field in order to classify and establish nosologies of diseases, similar to the taxonomies of the sexologists. This gaze is capable of reading the language the symptoms present, revealing the signifieds behind the signifiers, the diseases behind the symptoms. Record keeping is a topic of great importance in Stoker's Dracula, with Mina typing up notes, taking shorthand, the various diary and journal entries, and so forth. Likewise, record keeping proves to be one of the key elements in the formation of the clinical gaze. Foucault notes that "at the Edinburgh clinic the students kept a record of the diagnosis made, of the state of the patient at every visit, and of the medicines taken during the day" (Birth of the Clinic 61-62).

Also, both are collective efforts. Dracula is the compilation of a number of letters, diary entries, even phonographic recordings, by a variety of characters, including Mina Murray/Harker, Jonathan Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and so forth. While this has the effect of dispersing the text, it also has the effect of expanding the authoritative gaze across a field of characters. Similarly, of the medical gaze, Foucault notes "medical experience now has a collective subject" (Birth of the Clinic 110). He goes further, stating "the only normative observer is the totality of observers: the errors produced by their individual points of view are distributed in a totality that possesses its own power of indication. Their very divergences reveal, in this nucleus in which, after all, they intersect, the outline of undeniable identities" (Birth of the Clinic 102). The "totality of observers", the contributors to the diary and journal entries, is what is required to pin Dracula down, literally with a stake at the end of the novel, and it requires more than Van Helsing's medical and superstitious expertise to do this. He enlists the aid of the four other men, Jonathan, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, and Quincey Morris, as well as Mina Harker. Five characters add their "individual points of view" in order to establish the gaze which first sees, then finally fixes Dracula.

But this gaze is also the cause of a proliferation of discourse, becoming "a speaking eye" (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic 114). The observations of the characters are the cause of the diary entries in the first place--discourse proliferating into more discourse. The "speaking eye" of Dracula is also a "speaking I," as most the narratives of the novel are first person accounts in journal and diary entries. So what is the point of all of this discourse, both about disease and about vampirism? Simply put, the medical gaze, and its counterpart in Dracula, establishes itself to establish power over that which it is its object. Foucault writes "the gaze is passively linked to the primary passivity that dedicates it to the endless task of absorbing experience in its entirety, and of mastering it" (Birth of the Clinic xiv). The "speaking eye" seeks to know, and it seeks to dominate.

Traditionally, Western medicine has understood disease as being that which leads to death. Foucault argues, however, a shift occurred at the end of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th century towards an understanding of disease as being not that which leads to death, but springing from life itself, being a condition of life. Foucault notes "beneath the chronological life/disease/death relation, another, earlier, deeper figure is traced: that which links life and death, and so frees, besides, the signs of disease" (Birth of the Clinic 155). Disease goes from being the signifier of death itself to being a sign that shuttles between death and life, existing as a "deviation in life…of the order of life, but of a life that moves towards death" (Birth of the Clinic 156). Un-Death, in Van Helsing's schema, figures very similar to disease, existing in a space that's not life and certainly not death, but moving towards death in some fashion. He states, of the Un-Dead, that "they cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world, for all that die from the preying of the Un-Dead become themselves Un-Dead, and prey on their kind" (Dracula 220). Van Helsing goes further, exploring this third space, stating that "when this now Un-Dead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the poor lady whom we love shall be again free" (221). As his name for them implies, the Un-Dead are not dead, but inevitably, their condition leads towards the "true dead." Until then, however, they infect the living with their Un-Deadness. Foucault writes that "life with its real duration and disease as a possibility of deviation find their origin in the deeply buried point of death; it commands their existence from below" (Birth of the Clinic 158). Death is where both life and disease are ultimately rooted, or in the case of Dracula, where both life and Un-Death are rooted.

In Michel Foucault's argument, the "opening up of a few corpses" is required in order to effect this understanding of the relationship between the triad of life, death, and disease. The re-introduction of the anatomical gaze, which peers inside the body and into its organs after death, adds to the clinical understanding of disease and its symptoms. After this re-introduction, symptoms were no longer easily taken for signs of the disease itself, as practitioners found out that disease could exist with no symptoms, and that symptoms could exist but with other diseases. In Dracula, Van Helsing orders the figurative opening of Lucy's corpse, with a stake pounded through her heart by her fiance. Although Van Helsing is aware of vampires and Un-Death, as is Quincey Morris to a lesser extent, it isn't until this violent act of opening up Lucy's corpse, ostensibly to put her to rest, that the other characters gain an understanding of vampirism. The trip to the crypt confirms Van Helsing's belief that Lucy is, indeed, a vampire; Dr. Seward notes "outrageous as it was to open a leaden coffin, to see if a woman dead nearly a week were really dead, it now seemed the height of folly to open the tomb again, when we knew, from the evidence of our own eyesight, that the coffin was empty" (Dracula 205). Van Helsing and Dr. Seward, here, establish their anatomical gaze over the corpse, a gaze about which Dr. Seward writes "we doctors, who have had to study our dangers, have to become accustomed to such things" (Dracula 203). Of course, they are attempting to fix this corpse in place, but the corpse isn't quite cooperating with the good doctors in this, as she's up and moving about. After the staking of Lucy's body by Arthur, Van Helsing's understanding of vampirism and its symptoms shifts.

A lot has been written about Dracula as a form of psychoanalytic case study, and a lot has been written about the title character of the novel. By focussing on how Professor Van Helsing establishes his medical authority, particularly through the use of the gaze and through the opening up of corpses, we might see how medical authority establishes itself in society in general. Furthermore, in this investigation, we can see how this medical authority metaphorizes illness as foreign and perverse and, at the same time, a grave threat to the integrity of England itself. As I mentioned earlier, the discourses of both the threats of perversion and degeneration, coupled with the discourses of virtue and immunity, are often in contradiction with one another, but these contradictions serve to uphold the discourses rather than to hopelessly unravel them. The English subject, and particularly the English woman, is called to virtue while at the same time called to avoid the foreign, the diseased, and the immoral.